SpringSource buys Groovy and Grails specialist

SpringSource hopes to attract Java developers in the enterprise and dynamic languages fans with its acquisition of Groovy and Grails specialist G2One.

The company is today expected to announce that it's buying G2One's team of six experts for an undisclosed package comprising cash and stock. G21 may be small but customers included social network LinkedIn and UK TV broadcasting giant BskyB, who've built back-ends and content management systems on Grails for online users.

This is SpringSource's second acquisition this year, following Apache services company Covalent, and it confirms our earlier report.

SpringSource plans to integrate Grails with dm Server, the company's OSGi-based open-source Java server that uses the Spring Framework and launched this year. It also plans to "build value ads" around Grails and Groovy for enterprise customers in areas such as application management systems and the SpringSource tools suite. There's no timeframe for either, but SpringSource plans to deliver Grails support ahead of these.

Rod Johnson, SpringSource chief executive, told The Reg he believes SpringSource can appeal to enterprise users who want to work with dynamic languages and attract those using dynamic languages who want to move into the enterprise but who are new to the Java platform.

Johnson said Groovy would let enterprise programmers re-use their existing Java skills while Groovy programmers can tap underlying power of Java. Groovy is able to access Java class libraries and the Spring container, which is used in the dm Server and can run on the Java virtual machine (JVM).

Much of the dynamic-languages hype has centered on Ruby on Rails, which has eclipsed Groovy. Johnson pointed to Ruby on Rails' continued challenges in scalability and in dealing with complexity issues, such as object-relational mapping as hurdles to greater use in the enterprise. ®